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As we are nearing the end of August and having completed 2/3 of the year, I figured out it was about time I let you all know how things are going on the bullet journal front.

For those of you who either just started following me, or just forgot, I took the plunge into bullet journalling in January. I even wrote a blog post about it to let you all in on how I set up my planner for the whole year, you can go refresh your memory there.

As I went, my journal evolved a little and I now have a better idea what my needs are and what I will dump next January.

As a refresher, this is how the daily section of the month of January looked like when my journal was yet to be put to the test :

Back when I set that one up, I was still transitioning from years and years of using a regular planner, to something a bit more flexible. January had a rigid layout with columns and a grid.
But as I went, I started breaking the mould and at least embellish it :

This above is what it looked like half way through the first month. I needed to insert a specific to-do list and so I did. For the reccord, there are a lot of doodles and illustrations through the whole journal.

In February, I felt the need to drop the grid and rigidity and add more colors :

The cash expenses notes are looking like pinned notes and instead of dividing each days with a solid line I started exploring different styles. Each month has different styles and colors so I can tell them apart quickly.

The monthly spread also got a massive update. This is what it looked like for January :

That layout was way too minimalistic, I ended up adding the days of the week too it because I was getting constantly confused as I planned my month.

From the month of February onward this is how the Month at a glance page looked like :

Not only do I grid everything, I color the date AND include the day of the week. This simple trick has helped me TONS. It makes it much easier to find what I need to read or add to the planner.

I spend a little time setting that page up by the time the last week of the previous month rolls around and I know how many more page I need to plan things to end the month before inserting this spread. That little work is really really worth it in the end.

This page above is this current week and right now I am again feeling the need for a big change.
First, I am more and more in favour of not creating entries for days I have no to-do lists or expenses to log. As you can see, Sunday is missing in the picture, I was busy on that day, attending a social event, but it was already logged in my "Month at glance" page, I didn't need to enter it again, especially since this was a day long event and had nothing else to do and remember.

I also started doing less illustrations because I hate ruled paper and already spend a lot of my day doodling on quality paper. So instead I started entering one thing I was grateful for the day.
I already keep a gratitude diary on the side, but I enjoy closing my day by coloring the expenses box and putting one thing I am grateful for underneath before moving on to the next day. It's a closure ritual of sort.

At the end of my planner, I glued a pretty envelope to store all the odds and ends I want to keep. It contains important bills, pictures and business cards I do not want to loose.

The last few pages of the journal contain my important contact infos, my earnings reports and this :

These are my "practice pages" where I practice headers and stamp technique for the journal, and where I test pens to see if the ink would ghost through.

Things I want to change or keep for the next journal

The number one thing I am going to change in the next year's journal is that I will move away from lined paper.

It's too rigid and has gotten in the way of illustrations. Most bullet journalists will tell you that the best paper to journal on is the "dotted grid" paper. That kind of notebook is sadly still a rarity in India.

So, there is a solid chance I will bite the bullet and invest in a Moleskine notebook to plan 2018 (affiliate link alert by the way).

The notebook I am using this year is the "Look what happened" Donut diary. The paper quality is awesome, the binding so far has held its own and I have nothing against it other than the fact I really really wished they would tap into the dotted grid paper.

As far as planning things go, I will keep the month at glance and that type of yearly spread :

I will change the daily spread and only really enter days I have to-do lists to log and/or expenses and I will definitely go for a more artsy way of going about it, I got cured of my need for columns. Besides on days I have nothing to log I could end up saving space and pages for other things in the journal.

I will do away with that page :

Well not entirely, but it sure won't be a whole section. I can write my goals on top of the Month at glance page and see them more often (confession I do not consult the goal page at all...epic fail).

I will keep the blog stats section though, that one I find useful to have in one place to compare how my blog is doing months after months.

I already am in the process of implementing a financial page at the end of each month, where I list the total amount I need to pay to the ironing guy, and how much each of my income streams are earning me (and which months it is expected to end up in my account).

All in all, I love my bullet journal as it is a far more flexible system to plan my year/month and days than the conventional planner was. I also really enjoy my little ritual of closing the day and starting planning the next before bedtime. Then I can go to bed with a far more relaxed mind and it has reduced the amount of tossing and turning I usually do because of unsettled scores with the day to come.

It's not usually like me to disappear from the blog, well at least it hasn't been that way for a couple of years.
But some of you might have noticed that I have been posting a bit less frequently (though I still maintain a once a week standard schedule).

This is because I have been otherwise occupied with other things. First this past week we had two public holidays here in Mumbai : Independence Day on the 15th and the Parsi New Year on the 17th. This always mean I am no longer in the creative zone.
Artists will understand what I mean perfectly by that. To all of you who aren't making creativity your business, let me explain.

When I, and probably a lot of other artists, create things, we go in a "Do not disturb mode". It means you sit at your desk, drawing table or in front of your canvas, fully committed to the task of giving birth to something. It means distractions are NOT welcome, and best avoided, I even mute my phone on certain day. On those days, short of a cataclysmic event such as the apocalypse I won't give much of a hoot about what's going on with people or the world.
This of course has to stop on a public holiday because you have one or many little humans to keep alive and entertained (to some extent).
On those days, I might doodle, but not really go in anything too deep.

Blogging as far as I am concerned, is yet another creative project, heck, a lot of time goes into it. How much? At the peak of my blogging creativity streak, it consume my entire day.

But these days I am in artist mode more than in blogging mode. And that leaves almost no space for anything else during my workday.
I have been busy with a lot of things as of late, so let me take you on visual journey into my artsy world (with running commentaries) :

One fine day I found myself playing with a couple of mother dairy fruit yogurt pots holders. I talked about them in my mood board DIY post and this is what they look like :

I played with two of them, putting them on top of another, rotating them and saw a beautiful flower pattern emerge.
A few hours of drawing, coloring, scanning, tweaking, and re-colorizing it gave birth to two deigns I sell in ALL my shops :

A few manipulations in photoshop later and it turned into a blue version, again available everywhere I sell art, including on Society6 as a laptop sleeve.

But that's not all I have been doing, I also got into a sudden case of Autumn fever. An odd thing to get in a tropical climate where there is no such thing as Fall, or turning leaves. I blame the monsoon and it's grey sky (we didn't get that much rain this year...so far).

To be fair, my current obsession for turning leaves and all things Autumn is a great opportunity to practice my watercolor skills.
As much as I enjoy painting with watercolor paint, my medium of choice on paper is either colored pencil or markers, probably because I like my colors bold and saturated.

If like me you are aching for Fall and everything it brings (except the mush and gloom of November) you might like this one :

The sun setting on the ocean and the Summer beach with a tree and pumpkin in the foreground, what better way to illustrate what is to come if you live in colder latitudes? This cushion cover is from Society6, but it is also available on other products, and is also available on Redbubble.

Then the Autumn fever carried me all the way to naked trees and clear moonlit nights:

That one I ended naming "Colors of the night" and yep, it's for sale in all my shops again (click the shop tab on top of this blog).
It's a case of mixed media, one of my other favourite form of art. In this case it's two watercolor circles representing the night sky, and a curly twisty naked tree drawn in black ink with a brush pen.
The moon and stars are drawn with a silver gel pen.

The great thing with arts and illustration is the freedom to experiment and try new things, and I have been doing a lot of that too as of recently, not all of it is pretty, or Instagram worthy. But I am enjoying what I am learning doing so.

People who know me well, know that there are two things I HATE when it comes to art : Landscapes, and academic portrait and human body drawing.
I loathed a lot of my art school time assignment because they pretty much fell in either one or the other category, there is even a particular special hatred spot for portrait drawing in my heart.

And while I hate this whole bordering on the whole Greek era canon of beauty OCD school of drawing people: fuck proportions, fuck the whole 7 heads in one body length, fuck the photography like rendering of people.
I always enjoyed cartoon people, even though drawing them is always a MASSIVE struggle for me.

Why? Precisely because of that art school crap of only drawing Greek god-like human beings and the teacher insisting on perfect proportions for just about every freaking bits of anatomy. This is widely incompatible with cartoon drawing. And I find it really hard to let loose and draw more freely.

The little witch in the picture above is a more refined version of a sketch that reside in my sketchbook. I probably will end up digitizing this one in the near future. I haven't totally made up my mind about it just yet.

So, in short, I have been highly creative on paper, but not so much in the form of DIY and home decor projects as of late. Most of these drawings did consume a few hours of my day, the other part is spent marketing myself (I was already doing that bit with just the blog). So before you know it I have spent close to 8 hours of the day working on all of this, and the rest of the time is devoted to my social life, family, eating and sleeping.

It's been a little while I haven't done a DIY post on the blog, and it was long overdue. As long overdue as the mood board it is all about.

When we moved into this flat last April, the study while smaller than in our previous flat, still felt a bit bare. And there was one bit of wall I knew I wanted to turn into a mood board.
Since I am an artist, mood board sounds more appropriate than bulletin or message board but rest assured they are the same thing.
And, I will not lie, I found myself longing for IKEA to open in Mumbai already (still a long wait to go). Growing up, I had a very versatile framed cork board from there. It was above my desk in my childhood's bedroom. I used to pin pictures, magazine snippets and notes, in my teenage years it had more Boys bands pictures (New Kids On the Block anyone?) than memos and notes.

When I moved into my first grown up Studio apartment, the board came with me, but it got a bit of a makeover as the years had left it with holes in the cork and a faded wooden frame. I flipped it and painted it a deep burgundy red back then. It held my very grown up to-do lists, pictures and home decor inspiration then.

Man! I miss that board!

Sadly, no quality wooden framed cork board is really available at a decent price around here (believe me I looked), and the more I went thinking about, the least I saw myself with an all natural board anyway.
A lot of thinking, a lot of idea's browsing and I figured out I didn't really need a permanent solution right away.

And I came up with this :

This project required only two A3 sheet of cardboard from the stationery store, a bit of paint and best of all doesn't even require holes in the wall (more on that below).

The chances are that by the time it's worn out I will be in the mood for new colors, that or IKEA would have opened its door in India (and hopefully have an online store).

In the meantime, I have a place to display all my inspirations where I can see them and it fills that blank in my home office.

As I said, the project started with me buying and then taping together 2 sheets of A3 cardboard. Then, I painted it purple.
Because the cardboard is still fairly thin and prone to warping under moisture, I used my artist Acrylic paint undiluted, straight from the tube onto the board. This means I used quite a lot.

Once the paint was dry, I used a white chalk pencil to draw circles all over. And, yes, the purple "tool" is a plastic frame that was holding 4 pots of fruit yogurt at one point. I keep this type of stuff for my arts and craft purpose because I believe in up-cycling thing as much as I can and craft supplies don't have to all cost you a fortune. Those yogurt ring also make for a wonderful compass tool to make things like this flower mandala art.

I then colored the polka dots with gold paint. Actually, I first did one layer of white paint as a primer, and topped it with a layer of gold because the gold paint I own is semi-transparent and I needed my dots to pop.

Then all that was left was to put it on the wall. And as I said earlier, this mood board went on the wall without me having to put a hole in the wall, thanks to this super awesome thing:

This is called "Blu-Tack" and I am forever grateful to my friend for introducing me to it! This is a re-useable gummy adhesive that sticks to the wall and whatever thing you want to put on said wall. It leaves no marks when you peel it off (unlike scotch tape) and will hold a great deal of weight as well.

Seriously, if you do not have "Blu-Tack" I urge you to get some, that stuff is gold and I really don't know how I lived without it (and no I am not being dramatic....it's THAT good). I bought mine in my local art supplies store but you can also buy it on Amazon (Yes! This is an affiliate link)

This is how it looked right after it went up on the wall and before I started adding stuff to it. It fills a wall gap above an old CD tower (we don't even have a music system to play those CDs anymore) and a rather unsightly mess of charging cables and a paper bin.

Since I am currently working on creating some Autumn themed art, I taped some fall leaves printouts to the board.
I used washi tape to do the job, because it has less of a chance ripping the paint off my board than regular tape. Plus it looks far cuter that way.

Pins will also work on that board but will go all the way through and into the wall, so to preserve the wall underneath, I used two pins at an angle to hold some inspirational tags (you can see them in the first picture).

All in all, this project only costed me the price of the two cardboard sheet which was 50 rupees. I had the paint on hand already, so with the amount of paint I used plus the board I am still under 100 rupees of rough material for that project. We'll all agree it's a steal!

Time to wave July goodbye and embrace August and the return of festivals if you live in India:

Rakhshabandhan on the 7th, Independence Day on the 15th and Ganesh Chaturthi on the 25th, before long the festive season will once again claim us in a colorful and frantic whirlwind that will end with us ringing in the new year.

I wont loose myself in a lengthy rambling this month, I am just getting back into the groove now that Ishita has started school again. And I am busy getting my act together and do something creative today while I feel more inclined to sitting on the sofa and watching TV....the pitfalls of working from home I tell you!

The design for this month's calendar page goes back to tapping into my synesthetic quirk. August, is always a bright bokeh of yellow in my mind. As usual, you can go downloading it following this link.

“Cynthia Haller is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.in.”